Stuart Whatton

Stuart Whatton’s musical education began at Canterbury Cathedral Choir School and took him via the King’s School Canterbury to University College Oxford, where he was organ scholar from 1981 to 1984. After 14 years in the Civil Service, including two years as Private Secretary to the Attorney General (his original degree having been law), he decided to follow his heart into music full-time, and this led to a B.Mus with 1st class honours from King’s College London, where he also won the Purcell Prize. Following PGCE studies at Cambridge, Stuart spent the best part of a decade in full-time educational settings, running school music departments in Dorset, Essex and Scotland, before diverting into a more freelance musical career. A Fellow of both the Royal College of Organists and the Royal Society of Arts, Stuart has been Director of Music at Esher Parish Church since 2011, where concert projects over the past year have included complete performances of Beethoven’s oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives and Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace; this summer he will be conducting a combined choirs performance of the Mozart Requiem, with visiting instrumentalists from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Stuart is also Head of Keyboard at the Jonas Foundation UK, a charity offering free music tuition to inner city children. Since 2015 he has been Artistic Director of Music-at-Hill, one of the longest established concert societies in central London (now based at the Poets’ Church of St Giles-in-the-Fields) and prior to the pandemic he curated the St Lawrence Jewry Summer Music Festival at the Lord Mayor’s Church in the City of London. During his time in the capital, Stuart has been Assistant Organist to the Parish of Waterloo, Organist of the Ealing-based Questors Choir, and Director of Music at St Matthew’s Church, Southwark. His varied performing exploits have included appearing in a jazz piano sketch on Channel 4’s Banzai!, accompanying an international youth choir at a plenary session of the United Nations in Geneva, and performing at the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics as part of Danny Boyle’s “cast of thousands”. For the past two years running he has earned a commendation from Encore for being their most frequently booked organist, and his more recent engagements for them have included playing at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre for the Opening Ceremony of the European Transplant & Dialysis Games, as well as being house pianist for a Harry Potter murder mystery evening at a pub in Kilburn, as a result of which he has become an expert on scary chords!